Howard Garder 

Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is the Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero, and since 1995, he has been the co-director of the Good Project.

The author of over twenty books translated into over thirty languages, he is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, as outlined in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983).

Early life

Howard Earl Gardner was born July 11, 1943 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Ralph Gardner and Hilde (née Weilheimer) Gardner. Gardner described himself as "a studious child who gained much pleasure from playing the piano".^[2]

Career

Gardner was inspired by his readings of Jean Piaget to be trained in developmental psychology. He studied neuropsychology with Norman Geschwind and psycholinguistics with Roger Brown. During his undergraduate years, Gardner worked with renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson.

In 1965, Gardner received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Relations from Harvard University. His undergraduate thesis was titledThe retirement community in America.^[3] From 1965 to 1966, he read philosophy and sociology at the London School of Economics. He was awarded a PhD degree in Social and Developmental Psychology from Harvard University in 1971^[4] for his thesis titled The development of sensitivity to figural and stylistic aspects of paintings.^[5]

He began teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1986. While he is widely traveled and conducted research in China throughout the 1980s, his entire adult career has been spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1995, the focus of his work has been on the Good Work Project, now known as the Good Project.

Gardner is currently a board member at Amherst College, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA), and the American Philosophical Society (APS). He previously served on the board of the Spencer Foundation for 10 years (2001-2011).

Research

According to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, humans have several different ways of processing information and these ways are relatively independent of one another. The theory is a critique of the standard intelligence theory, which emphasizes the correlation among abilities. Since 1999, Gardner has identified eight intelligences: linguistic, logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Gardner is informally considering two additional intelligences, existential and pedagogical.^[6][7]

In 1967, Professor Nelson Goodman started an educational program called Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education which began in the area of arts education but now spans a wide variety of educational arenas.^[8] Howard Gardner and David Perkins were founding Research Assistants and Gardner and Perkins later Co-Directed Project Zero from 1972-2000. Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines at the individual and institutional levels.^[9]

For almost two decades, in collaboration with William Damon, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and several other colleagues, Gardner has been directing research on the nature of good work, good play, and good collaboration. The goal of his research is to determine what it means to achieve work that is at once excellent, engaging, and carried out in an ethical way. Going beyond research, with colleagues Lynn Barendsen, Wendy Fischman, and Carrie James, the Gardner team has developed Toolkits for use in educational and professional circles.

Activities for at Intelligences 

Logical/mathematical: Enjoys working with numbers, doing experiments

Teaching tip: Use "science thinking": Ask students to identify scientific principles in areas other than science. 

Fun activity (grades 4-6): Find three random things (for example, a blade of grass, the word "long," and the process "jumping") and ask your students to invent an object that uses all three.

Fun activity (grades 6-8): Ask students to reinvent or improve upon the designs of everyday objects.

Visual/spatial: Enjoys drawing and painting

Teaching tip: Use colors as visual cues: Use a variety of colors of chalk and markers when writing in front of the class. Students can use different colored markers to "color code" materials they are studying. 

Fun activity (grades 4-6): Draw an unusual shape and have each student include it in a drawing of his or her own. 

Fun activity (grades 6-8): Play drawing games such as Pictionary or Win, Lose or Draw. Have students make rapid drawings to capture key points being discussed in a class lesson.

Naturalist: Enjoys studying things in nature, such as rocks, dinosaurs, insects, plants

Teaching tip: Noticing patterns: Encourage students to form their own systems for sorting and categorizing information. 

Fun activity (grades 4-6): Show pictures of various animals or plants and ask students to figure out what they have in common. 

Fun activity (grades 6-8): Given certain basic guiding principles, ask students to describe an animal, ecosystem, or other natural entity. To stimulate creativity, the entity need not exist at present, but should be theoretically imaginable.

Bodily/kinesthetic: Enjoys dancing, crafts, or sports

Teaching tip: Classroom theater: Students can act out the material to be learned through role-playing.

Fun activity (grades 4-6): Ask students what they like to eat for lunch – and have them act out the answers in a game of charades. 

Fun activity (grades 6-8): Use the human body as a "map" for learning new information in different subjects. In geography, for example, the body might represent Europe. If the head is Scandanavia, then where is Italy?

Characteristics of the 7 Intelligences

• One of the main goals of the Multiple Intelligence theory is to expand our horizon of teaching tools far beyond the traditional ways used in most schools. Multiple Intelligences can be broken down into these 8 sub catagories (as seen in the above picture).

               1. Linguistic Intelligence

               2. Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

               3.Spatial Intelligence

               4. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence

               5. Musical Intelligence

               6. Interpersonal Intelligence

               7. Intrapersonal Intelligence

               8. Naturalist Intelligence

• The purpose of the multiple intelligence theory is for teachers to no longer just pay attention to the lingustic and logical ways of learning, but also the other ways. Mutliple Intelligence encourages teachers to teach in a more exciting way using music, art activites, multimedia, field trips and etc. 

• Multiple Intelligence provides 8 different pathways to learning. This is very helpful because as we all know, all students do not learn best in the same fashion. With these 8 different the teacher has many options for teaching and can choose which one he or she thinks will work best with their lesson. Some examples of the way to teach to each of these sub catagories are found below.

               1. words (linguistic)

               2. numbers or logic (logical-mathematical)

               3. pictures (spatial)

               4. music (musical)

               5. self-reflection (intrapersonal)

               6. a physical experience (bodily-kinesthetic)

               7. a social experience (interpersonal)

               8. an experience in the natural world (naturalistic)

The theory of multiple intelligences is a theory of intelligence that differentiates it into specific (primarily sensory) "modalities", rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by a single general ability. This model was proposed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner articulated seven criteria for a behavior to be considered an intelligence. These were that the intelligences showed: potential for brain isolation by brain damage, place in evolutionary history, presence of core operations, susceptibility to encoding (symbolic expression), a distinct developmental progression, the existence of savants, prodigies and other exceptional people, and support from experimental psychology and psychometric findings.

Gardner chose eight abilities that he held to meet these criteria: musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential and moral intelligence may also be worthy of inclusion. Although the distinction between intelligences has been set out in great detail, Gardner opposes the idea of labeling learners to a specific intelligence. Each individual possesses a unique blend of all the intelligences. Gardner firmly maintains that his theory of multiple intelligences should "empower learners", not restrict them to one modality of learning.

Gardner argues intelligence is categorized into three primary or overarching categories, those of which are formulated by the abilities. According to Gardner, intelligence is: 1) The ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture, 2) a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life, and 3) the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge.